Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 22) On location in Weeks Island, Louisiana, J.C. Boudreaux poses in front of his fictional home, deep in the swamps. Louisiana Story is a fable in black-and-white set along Bayou Petit Anse between Abbeville and New Iberia. Flaherty’s depiction of “a simple and lyrical account of daily life in the oil country” paints in broad cinematic strokes a stereotypical backwater Cajun family scraping out a meager existence before an oil strike ameliorates their troubles by introducing civilization. The director filters his tale of progress through the perspective of the film’s main character, Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Latour, played by Cameron Parish adolescent J. C. Boudreaux. Latour’s bicultural experience in the film — his intimate association with nature (tradition) and the drilling crew (modernity) — was an overt nod to Flaherty’s own life experiences. “Louisiana Story is autobiographical,” explains the film’s co-screenwriter Frances Flaherty in The Odyssey of a FilmMaker: Robert Flaherty’s Story. “It is Bob remembering his childhood with his father, a mining engineer, on the Canadian frontier … The wonder of this world in the mind and heart of a boy is the truth of the film and its enchantment.” To make his point clearly, the director exaggerated the Cajun community’s isolation to emphasize Louisiana Story’s central premise: technology’s effect on rural communities. To be sure, the fictitious Latour family bore little resemblance to the actors playing their parts. Their lives beyond acting mattered less than the ethnic ideal Flaherty labored to translate on film. Louisiana Story took a year and three months to complete at a cost of $258,000. Standard Oil of New Jersey, the film’s sole investor, provided the unprecedented budget along with a mandate that the docu-drama should signify: “A permanent artistic record of the contributions of which the oil industry had made to civilization. A film that represents the story of oil with the dignity and the epic sweep it deserves, and assure[s] the story of a lasting place on the highest plane in the literature of the screen. The film will also be such an absorbing human story that it would stand on its own feet as entertainment anywhere. Because of its entertainment value, it would be distributed theatrically through the regular motion picture houses, both in America and abroad.” Standard’s public relations department further cloaked their propaganda agenda by keeping the company name off the film credits. During their initial negotiations, Standard accommodated Flaherty’s request for a three-month exploratory survey of America’s most productive oil fields. Bob and Frances visited Texas, Oklahoma, but more importantly, Standard refineries in Baton Rouge and the various oil fields dotting south-central Louisiana’s waterways. There, in the bayou country, they found inspiration for Louisiana Story. Bob maintained, “One day we stopped the car for lunch near the edge of a bayou. Suddenly, over the heads of the marsh grass, an oil derrick came into our view. It was moving up the bayou, towed by a launch. In motion, this familiar structure suddenly became poetry, its slim lines rising clean and taut above the unending flatness of the marshes … I looked at Frances. She looked at me. We knew then that we had our picture.” With $175,000 in hand, the Flaherty family moved to Cajun Country. Flaherty established his headquarters in Abbeville. Large fans ran night and day to cool his spacious rented house filled with the director’s production team, Cajun actors and their entourage, visiting artists, writers, and photographers. FLAHERTY IN ABBEVILLE 22 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2009 STANDARD OIL (NEW JERSEY) COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE
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